Alexandra Small AP Language & Compositon

The Catcher in the Rye and Impulse both have similarities between their narrators and characters. Impulse is a very powerful book with mature subject matters, but even so, it related very well to The Catcher in the Rye. The three characters in Impulse are all admitted into the Aspen Springs psychiatric hospital for all wanting to end their lives with different motives. Holden can relate to the three characters and mostly their lives before the psychiatric hospital. Through quotes, texts, songs and pictures The Catcher in the Rye and Impulse play out and compliment each other through similarities. In slide one, Tony and Holden are compared through their anger and outburst after losing a loved one. Tony, a character in Impulse was dating an older man named Philip. Philip became very sick and passed away. The only way for Tony to feel better was to turn to pills. He was hospitalized for trying to overdose and was put into the psychiatric hospital. Holden goes through a struggle when his brother Allie dies. When Allie died, Holden broke all the windows in his garage and had to be hospitalized. Holden ends up regretting this because he was still hospitalized during Allie’s funeral and couldn’t attend it. While Philip was alive he sent Tony a baseball glove and a ball for his birthday. This compares to The Catcher in the Rye because Allie had a baseball glove and he would write poems in green ink all over the glove. This gave him something to read while he was standing in the field waiting for the ball to get hit to him. Tony became very lonely and had nobody to even play baseball with because Philip was the only person he could trust and was loyal to. Holden didn’t get along with many people at Pencey Prep and this caused him to feel lonely at times, throughout the book he tries to find a companion through woman, teachers, family members and dear friends. His rude behavior turns people away and leave him in pain and emotional. As Tony turns to pills, Holden turns to alcohol. Slide two compares the title of the book, The Catcher in the Rye and a foreshadowing quote by Tony in Impulse. In chapter 22, Holden explains what he believes the lyric, “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye” means to him. He imagines a field of rye on a cliff with children playing. When the children become unsafe and get to close to the edge of the cliff he will be there to catch them and protect their innocence. Holden seems to believe that if the children were to fall, they would land in a world of instability and would grow up to fast, maybe even referring to his sister as one of the children he didn’t protect and keep innocent. To Tony in Impulse the bottom of the cliff means death and never going back to the top of anything. Tony’s quote about seeing people fall off the edge and ending their life foreshadows the painful decision another patient in Aspen Springs decides to make. Conner steps off a cliff edge and kills himself. Conner is overwhelmed and feels defeated. He thinks about his family, but that doesn’t stop him. Conner kills himself. Slide three demonstrates the close relationship between Holden and his little sister Phoebe and Vanessa and her younger brother Bryan. Holden and Phoebe have a natural and innocent relationship. He loves Phoebe very much. Everybody else Holden meets he calls phony, he never called Phoebe a phony and they have a very strong relationship. Phoebe understands Holden because she is very intelligent, and he’ll be the first one to admit it, she even looks down upon Holden for his immaturity. Vanessa, the third character in Impulse has an eight-year-old brother, Bryan. He was the one that found her in the bathroom cutting herself. Bryan is too little to understand death, but he knew what he saw was not normal and Vanessa describes his scream as if it went on forever. Before Vanessa went into the psychiatric hospital, her brother Bryan feared death. While Vanessa is in the hospital her grandmother explains to her that Bryan has been reading a lot and isn’t afraid of death so much after seeing the progress somebody can make, that somebody being his sister. By the end of Impulse Bryan became more like Phoebe and grew to be mature and understanding of his sister, just like Phoebe is understanding of Holden. Throughout The Catcher in the Rye Holden repeatedly refers to people as phony, and that is pretty much the only word he will use to describe a person. Ellen Hopkins, the author of Impulse wrote it using repetition. She used words and phrases to express the importance because the book is written in poem form. For example, the repetitive words were, “maybe”, “freak” and better to emphasize Tony’s contemplations of himself. In slide one I chose “Hey Jude” by the Beatles mainly because of the lyric, “take a sad song and make it better.” Tony took it upon himself to keep living and not kill himself and got treatment. Holden decided not to focus on going back to school in the fall, but focusing on him. Also, when John Lennon was killed, the man that killed him had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and even had him sign it earlier that day. “Jumper” recorded by Third Eye Blind is the song heard in the second slide because it explains the singers desire for his friend to take life easier and enjoy it, he even says, “I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend, you could cut the ties with the lies that you’ve been living in.” This relates to Holden because he wants the children he has a fantasy about catching to slow down their lives and live innocently for as long as they can. This also relates to Conner and Tony for taking a step back from the ledge and instead of jumping, walk away and fix their lives for the better. In the third slide, “The Last to Say” by Atmosphere is heard. It explains self-abuse to the mind because the woman in it keeps coming back for more abuse from her husband. She is just hurting herself and her kids see it, but don’t know what to do or how to handle it. They eventually tell her not to stay and go on with her life, because she is only getting hurt if she keeps coming back and looking for excuses for more pain. The last slide plays “Catcher in the Rye” by Guns N’ Roses. The lyric “took our innocence” refers to Holden wanting to catch the children from falling off a cliff. “That needed comfort from somebody and needed comfort from someone” refers to Tony, Conner and Vanessa needing help for their problems due to wanting to end their life. Lastly, The Catcher in the Rye and Impulse displayed similarities, even though the genres and writing styles were different.